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$Unique_ID{bob01291}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Chapter 25}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{king
regiment
own
upon
blood
case
even
himself
time
army
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1889}
$Log{See King Arthur*0129101.scf
}
Title:       (A) Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1889

Chapter 25

A Competitive Examination

     When the king traveled for change of air, or made a progress, or visited
a distant noble whom he wished to bankrupt with the cost of his keep, part of
the administration moved with him.  It was a fashion of the time.  The
Commission charged with the examination of candidates for posts in the army
came with the king to the Valley, whereas they could have transacted their
business just as well at home.  And although this expedition was strictly a
holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of his business functions going,
just the same.  He touched for the evil, as usual; he held court in the gate
at sunrise and tried cases, for he was himself Chief Justice of the King's
Bench.

     He shone very well in this latter office.  He was a wise and humane
judge, and he clearly did his honest best and fairest - according to his
lights.  That is a large reservation.  His lights - I mean his rearing - often
colored his decisions.  Whenever there was a dispute between a noble or
gentleman and a person of lower degree, the king's leanings and sympathies
were for the former class always, whether he suspected it or not. It was
impossible that this should be otherwise.  The blunting effects of slavery
upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world
over, and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders
under another name.  This has a harsh sound and yet should not be offensive to
any - even to the noble himself - unless the fact itself be an offense: for
the statement simply formulates a fact.  The repulsive feature of slavery is
the thing, not its name.  One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the
classes that are below him to recognize - and in but indifferently modified
measure - the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these
are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling.  They are the
result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom
of regarding himself as a superior being. The king's judgment wrought frequent
injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and
unalterable sympathies.  He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the
average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in
famine time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.

     One very curious case came before the king.  A young girl, an orphan, who
had a considerable estate, married a fine young fellow who had nothing. The
girl's property was within a seignory held by the Church.  The bishop of the
diocese, an arrogant scion of the great nobility, claimed the girl's estate on
the ground that she had married privately, and thus had cheated the Church out
of one of its rights as lord of the seignory - the one heretofore referred to
as le droit du seigneur.  The penalty of refusal or avoidance was
confiscation.  The girl's defense was that the lordship of the seignory was
vested in the bishop, and the particular right here involved was not
transferable, but must be exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated; and
that an older law of the Church itself strictly barred the bishop from
exercising it.  It was a very odd case, indeed.

     It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious
way in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the Mansion
House.  A person who had not taken the Sacrament according to the Anglican
rite, could not stand as a candidate for sheriff of London.  Thus Dissenters
were ineligible; they could not run if asked, they could not serve if
elected.  The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise,
hit upon this neat device: they passed a bylaw imposing a fine of 400 Pounds
upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff, and a fine of
600 Pounds upon any person who, after being elected sheriff, refused to
serve.  Then they went to work and elected a lot of Dissenters, one after
another, and kept it up until they had collected 15,000 Pounds in fines; and
there stands the stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing
citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees
slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given their race a
unique and shady reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that be in
the earth.

     The girl's case seemed strong to me; the bishop's case was just as
strong.  I did not see how the king was going to get out of this hole.  But he
got out.  I append his decision:

     "Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a child's
affair for simpleness.  An the young bride had conveyed notice, as in duty
bound, to her feudal lord and proper master and protector the bishop, she had
suffered no loss, for the said bishop could have got a dispensation making
him, for temporary conveniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right,
and thus would she have kept all she had.  Whereas, failing in her first
duty, she hath by that failure failed in all; for whoso, clinging to a rope,
severeth it above his hands, must fall; it being no defense to claim that the
rest of the rope is sound, neither any deliverance from his peril, as he
shall find.  Pardy, the woman's case is rotten at the source.  It is the
decree of the Court that she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods,
even to the last farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in
the costs.  Next!"

     Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months old.
Poor young creatures!  They had lived these three months lapped to the lips in
worldly comforts.  These clothes and trinkets they were wearing were as fine
and dainty as the shrewdest stretch of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of
their degree; and in these pretty clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he
trying to comfort her with hopeful words set to the music of despair, they
went from the judgment seat out into the world homeless, bedless, breadless;
why, the very beggars by the roadsides were not so poor as they.

     Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms satisfactory to the
Church and the rest of the aristocracy, no doubt.  Men write many fine and
plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where
every man in a State has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.  Arthur's people
were of course poor material for a republic, because they had been debased so
long by monarchy, and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make
short work of that law which the king had just been administering if it had
been submitted to their full and free vote.  There is a phrase which has grown
so common in the world's mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and
meaning - the sense and meaning implied when it is used - that is, the phrase
which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being "capable of
self-government"; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation
somewhere, sometime or other which wasn't capable of it - wasn't as able to
govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern
it.  The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent
multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only -
not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation's
intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in
the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that
it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself.  Which is to
assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best governed and most free
and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by
its people; and that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades,
all the way down to the lowest.

     King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond my
calculations.  I had not supposed he would move in the matter while I was
away; and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining the merits of
officers; I had only remarked that it would be wise to submit every candidate
to a sharp and searching examination; and privately I meant to put together a
list of military qualifications that nobody could answer to but my West
Pointers.  That ought to have been attended to before I left; for the king was
so taken with the idea of a standing army that he couldn't wait but must get
about it at once, and get up as good a scheme of examination as he could
invent out of his own head.

[See King Arthur: King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether
beyond my calculations.]

     I was impatient to see what this was; and to show, too, how much more
admirable was the one which I should display to the Examining Board.  I
intimated this, gently, to the king, and it fired his curiosity.  When the
Board was assembled, I followed him in, and behind us came the candidates. One
of these candidates was a bright young West Pointer of mine, and with him were
a couple of my West Point professors.

     When I saw the Board, I did not know whether to cry or to laugh.  The
head of it was the officer known to later centuries as Norroy King-at-Arms!
The two other members were chiefs of bureaus in his department; and all three
were priests, of course; all officials who had to know how to read and write
were priests.

     My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head of the
Board opened on him with official solemnity:

     "Name?"

     "Mal-ease."

     "Son of?"

     "Webster."

     "Webster - Webster.  Hm - I - my memory faileth to recall the name.
Condition?"

     "Weaver."

     "Weaver - God keep us!"

     The king was staggered, from his summit to his foundations; one clerk
fainted, and the others came near it.  The chairman pulled himself together,
and said indignantly:

     "It is sufficient.  Get you hence."

     But I appealed to the king.  I begged that my candidate might be
examined.  The king was willing, but the Board, who were all well-born folk,
implored the king to spare them the indignity of examining the weaver's son.
I knew they didn't know enough to examine him anyway, so I joined my prayers
to theirs and the king turned the duty over to my professors.  I had had a
blackboard prepared, and it was put up now, and the circus began.  It was
beautiful to hear the lad lay out the science of war, and wallow in details
of battle and siege, of supply, transportation, mining and countermining,
grand tactics, big strategy and little strategy, signal service, infantry,
cavalry, artillery, and all about siege guns, field guns, gatling guns,
rifled guns, smooth bores, musket practice, revolver practice - and not a
solitary word of it all could these catfish make head or tail of, you
understand - and it was handsome to see him  chalk off mathematical
nightmares on the blackboard that would stump the angels themselves, and do
it like nothing, too - all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and
constellations, and mean time, and sidereal time, and dinner time, and
bedtime, and every other imaginable thing above the clouds or under them that
you could harry or bullyrag an enemy with  and make him wish he hadn't
come - and when the boy made his military salute and stood aside at last, I
was proud enough to hug him, and all those other people were so dazed they
looked partly petrified, partly drunk, and wholly caught out and snowed
under.  I judged that the cake was ours, and by a large majority.

     Education is a great thing.  This was the same youth who had come to
West Point so ignorant that when I asked him,  "If a general officer should
have a horse shot under him on the field of battle, what ought he to do?"
answered up naively and said:

     "Get up and brush himself."

     One of the young nobles was called up, now.  I thought I would question
him a little myself.  I said:

     "Can  your lordship read?"

     His face flushed indignantly, and he fired this at me:

     "Takest me for a clerk?  I trow I am not of a blood that" -

     "Answer the question!"

     He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer "No."

     "Can you write?"

     He wanted to resent this, too, but I said:

     "You will confine yourself to the questions, and make no comments.
You are not here to air your blood or your graces, and nothing of the sort
will be permitted.  Can you write?"

     "No."

     "Do you know the multiplication table?"

     "I wit not what ye refer to."

     "How much is nine times six?"

     "It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency
requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so, not
having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge."

     "If A trade a barrel of onions to B, worth twopence the bushel, in
exchange for a sheep worth fourpence and a dog worth a penny, and C kill the
dog before delivery, because bitten by the same, who mistook him for D, what
sum is still due to A from B, and which party pays for the dog, C or D, and
who gets the money?  If A, is the penny sufficient, or may he claim
consequential damages in the form of additional money to represent the
possible profit which might have inured from the dog, and classifiable as
earned increment, that is to say, usufruct?"

     "Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who moveth in
mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never heard the fellow to this
question for confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of thought.
Wherefore I beseech you let the dog and the onions and these people of the
strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their
piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their
trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should but
damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself to see the
desolation wrought."

     "What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation?"

     "If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did promulgate them whilst
that I lay sick about the beginning of the year and thereby failed to hear
his proclamation."

     "What do you know of the science of optics?"

     "I know of governors of places, and seneschals of castles, and sheriffs
of counties, and many like small offices and titles of honor, but him you
call the Science of Optics I have not heard of before; peradventure it is a
new dignity."

     "Yes, in this country."

     Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official
position, of any kind under the sun!  Why, he had all the earmarks of a
typewriter copyist, if you leave out the disposition to contribute uninvited
emendations of your grammar and punctuation.  It was unaccountable that he
didn't attempt a little help of that sort out of his majestic supply of
incapacity for the job.  But that didn't prove that he hadn't material in him
for the disposition, it only proved that he wasn't a typewriter copyist yet.
After nagging him a little more, I let the professors loose on him and they
turned him inside out, on the line of scientific war, and found him empty, of
course.  He knew somewhat about the warfare of the time - bushwhacking around
for ogres, and bullfights in the tournament ring, and such things - but
otherwise he was empty and useless.  Then we took the other young noble in
hand, and he was the first one's twin, for ignorance and incapacity.  I
delivered them into the hands of the chairman of the board with the
comfortable consciousness that their cake was dough.  They were examined in
the previous order of precedence.

     "Name, so please you?"

     "Pertipole, son of Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."

     "Grandfather?"

     "Also Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."

     "Great-grandfather?"

     "The same name and title."

     "Great-great-grandfather?"

     "We had none, worshipful sir, the line failing before it had reached so
far back."

     "It mattereth not.  It is a good four generations, and fulfilleth the
requirements of the rule."

     "Fulfills what rule?"  I asked.

     "The rule requiring four generations of nobility or else the candidate
is not eligible."

     "A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the army unless he can prove
four generations of noble descent?"

     "Even so; neither lieutenant nor any other officer may be commissioned
without that qualification."

     "Oh come, this is an astonishing thing.  What good is such a
qualification as that?"

     "What good?  It is a hardy question, fair sir and Boss, since it doth go
far to impugn the wisdom of even our holy Mother Church herself."

     "As how?"

     "For that she hath established the self-same rule regarding saints.  By
her law none may be canonized until he hath lain dead four generations."

     "I see, I see - it is the same thing.  It is wonderful.  In the one case
a man lies dead-alive four generations - mummified in ignorance and
sloth - and that qualifies him to command live people, and take their weal
and woe into his impotent hands; and in the other case, a man lies bedded
with death and worms four generations, and that qualifies him for office in
the celestial camp.  Does the king's grace approve of this strange law?"

     The king said:

     "Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange.  All places of honor
and of profit do belong, by natural right, to them that be of noble blood,
and so these dignities in the army are their property and would be so without
this or any rule.  The rule is but to mark a limit.  Its purpose is to keep
out too recent blood, which would bring into contempt these offices, and men
of lofty lineage would turn their backs and scorn to take them.  I were to
blame an I permitted this calamity.  You can permit it an you are minded so
to do, for you have the delegated authority, but that the king should do it
were a most strange madness and not comprehensible to any."

     "I yield.  Proceed, sir Chief of the Herald's College."

     The chairman resumed as follows:

     "By what illustrious achievement for the honor of the Throne and State
did the founder of your great line lift himself to the sacred dignity of the
British nobility?"

     "He built a brewery."

     "Sire, the Board finds this candidate perfect in all the requirements
and qualifications for military command, and doth hold his case open for
decision after due examination of his competitor."

     The competitor came forward and proved exactly four generations of
nobility himself.  So there was a tie in military qualifications that far.

     He stood aside, a moment, and Sir Pertipole was questioned further:

     "Of what condition was the wife of the founder of your line?"

     "She came of the highest landed gentry, yet she was not noble; she was
gracious and pure and charitable, of a blameless life and character, insomuch
that in these regards was she peer of the best lady in the land."

     "That will do.  Stand down."  He called up the competing lordling again,
and asked: "What was the rank and condition of the great-grandmother who
conferred British nobility upon your great house?"

     "She was a king's leman and did climb to that splendid eminence by her
own unholpen merit from the sewer where she was born."

     "Ah, this indeed is true nobility, this is the right and perfect
intermixture.  The lieutenancy is yours, fair lord.  Hold not in contempt;
it is the humble step which will lead to grandeurs more worthy of the
splendor of an origin like to thine."

     I was down in the bottomless pit of humiliation.  I had promised myself
an easy and zenith-scouring triumph, and this was the outcome!

     I was almost ashamed to look my poor disappointed cadet in the face.  I
told him to go home and be patient, this wasn't the end.

     I had a private audience with the king, and made a proposition.  I said
it was quite right to officer that regiment with nobilities, and he couldn't
have done a wiser thing.  It would also be a good idea to add five hundred
officers to it; in fact, add as many officers as there were nobles and
relatives of nobles in the country, even if there should finally be five
times as many officers as privates in it, and thus make it the crack
regiment, the envied regiment, the King's Own regiment, and entitled to fight
on its own hook and in its own way, and go whither it would and come when it
pleased, in time of war, and be utterly swell and independent.  This would
make that regiment the heart's desire of all the nobility, and they would all
be satisfied and happy.  Then we would make up the rest of the standing army
out of commonplace materials, and officer it with nobodies, as was proper -
nobodies selected on a basis of mere efficiency - and we would make this
regiment toe the line, allow it no aristocratic freedom from restraint, and
force it to do all the work and persistent hammering, to the end that
whenever the King's Own was tired and wanted to go off for a change and
rummage around amongst ogres and have a good time, it could go without
uneasiness, knowing that matters were in safe hands behind it, and business
going to be continued at the old stand, same as usual.  The king was charmed
with the idea.

     When I noticed that, it gave me a valuable notion.  I thought I saw my
way out of an old and stubborn difficulty at last.  You see, the royalties of
the Pendragon stock were a long-lived race and very fruitful.  Whenever a
child was born to any of these - and it was pretty often - there was wild joy
in the nation's mouth, and piteous sorrow in the nation's heart.  The joy was
questionable, but the grief was honest.  Because the event meant another call
for a Royal Grant.  Long was the list of these royalties, and they were a
heavy and steadily increasing burden upon the treasury and a menace to the
crown.  Yet Arthur could not believe this latter fact, and he would not
listen to any of my various projects for substituting something in the place
of the royal grants.  If I could have persuaded him to now and then provide a
support for one of the these outlying scions from his own pocket, I could
have made a grand to-do over it, and it would have had a good effect with the
nation; but no, he wouldn't hear of such a thing.  He had something like a
religious passion for a royal grant; he seemed to look upon it as a sort of
sacred swag, and one could not irritate him in any way so quickly and so
surely as by an attack upon that venerable institution.  If I ventured to
cautiously hint that there was not another respectable family in England that
would humble itself to hold out the hat - however, that is as far as I ever
got; he always cut me short, there, and peremptorily, too.

     But I believed I saw my chance at last.  I would form this crack regiment
out of officers alone - not a single private.  Half of it should consist of
nobles, who should fill all the places up to Major General, and serve gratis
and pay their own expenses; and they would be glad to do this when they should
learn that the rest of the regiment would consist exclusively of princes of
the blood.  These princes of the blood should range in ranks from Lieutenant
General up to Field Marshal, and be gorgeously salaried and equipped and fed
by the state.  Moreover - and this was the master stroke - it should be
decreed that these princely grandees should be always addressed by a
stunningly gaudy and awe-compelling title (which I would presently invent) and
they and they only in all England should be addressed.  Finally, all princes
of the blood should have free chance: join that regiment, get that great
title, and renounce the royal grant, or stay out and receive a grant.  Neatest
touch of all: unborn but imminent princes of the blood could be born into the
regiment, and start fair, with good wages and a permanent situation, upon due
notice from the parents.

     All the boys would join, I was sure of that; so all existing grants
would be relinquished; that the newly born would always join was equally
certain.  Within sixty days that quaint and bizarre anomaly, the Royal Grant,
would cease to be a living fact, and take its place among the curiosities of
the past.